I want to share my variant. The biggest problem I find in AoS is the lucky factor in the Production Phase, and in order to make a more balanced production I have made this variant.Also with this variant the production action becomes more important in the final turns.

It's similar to other card variants you can find in other threads, but in my case I use wooden tokens and some extra rules.

You will need:

1 white bag with the folowing content:18 white tokens numbered as follows: 3 each of 1,2,3,4,5,63 red tokens (with 4 players you'll only need 2 red tokens, and with 3 or less players just 1 red token)1 black bag with the folowing content:18 black tokens numbered as follows: 3 each of 1,2,3,4,5,63 red tokens (with 4 players you'll only need 2 red tokens, and with 3 or less players just 1 red token)

rules:On each production phase take from each bag as many tokens as players are playing. The goods that matches the numbers are placed on the board, and the tokens are placed on their place at the production chart.If a red token is taken no good is placed. Put the red token again in the bag (after the phase ends).

When somebody uses the production action adding goods to the production chart you have to put back to the bag the corresponding token.

When a city is urbanized there have to be at least 2 corresponding tokens in the bag, if not you must add them.

Example for a 5 players game:The following token came out of the white bag:1,3,3,red,6 so:

Take 1 good from the 1st white columnTake 2 goods from the 3rd white column and (if needed) 2 from the A cityTake 1 good from the 6th white column and (if needed) 1 from the D cityPut the red token back to the bag

Do the same way with the black bag

You can see a couple of photos here:

I have tested this system many times and it works very nice. I hope this was helpful.

1. It is an adaptation of the "Dice Deck" concept. 2. In this variant nearly all of the cubes will enter play, but you still don't know exactly when, right? So, there is still some luck.

Age of Steam is a game that is all about being “tweaked” – almost every one of the expansion maps takes the base system and changes it into something different. Your change is right in the vein. Bravo!

There is no chance that any cube will e left on the chart at the end of the game, right?

If the production action is chosen several times (a lot of new cubes on the game) and the red tokens come out of the bag very often too, there will be a few cubes remaining on the chart by the end of the game. But this isn't common . So usually all the cubes will be used.

I played AoS last friday using this tweak for the game and I really liked it. It adds a lot of importance to the production action making it more interesting at the end of the game. As I told you Gonzalo, this variant fixes one of the two only drawbacks I can find in AoS: production and VP reduction at the end of every turn. We have to play it a couple of times more to confirm the early good expectatives but I think it really works flawlessly.